Help me fix my friends laptop

[lozina]

My friend's laptop had a bunch of nasty crap on it which I cleaned up mostly via manual methods. He couldn't access the Internet at all previously.

Now I can get connected and actually visit web sites via Firefox no problem but it seems like every program which tries to update itself through the Internet cannot establish a connection.

Things like ClamWin Antivirus, Spybot S&D, Malwarebytes Anti-Malware.... none of them can update themselves!

Also another peculiar thing is if I hit "ping 192.168.1.1" which is my gateway, it just says request timed out every time.

How is it possible that ping cannot reach my gateway yet Firefox can access the Internet?

Something really strange going on...

I tried WinSock XP Fix and LSPFix and they have not improved the situation. The listings under LSPFix look good.

His laptop has Windows XP Pro SP2

 

[biostud]

is it a wireless network? or have you tried connecting via cable?

 

[lozina]

It did not matter if I tried the wireless or the cabled network.

But I think I solved it now... I think Sygate personal firewall went out of control. I disabled Sygate from loading up during Windows boot through msconfig and I confirmed the program was not running in Task Manager or ProcessExplorer yet it somehow seemed to still affect the network traffic. I finally just uninstalled the program and finally all the programs now have Internet access.

I have no idea how this was possible since the program was not running but there you have it... after uninstalling it the problem went away...